funerary rites and the buddhist meaning of death - Siamese Heritage ...

2 Phra Khru Anusaraf!asasanakiarti & Charles F. Keyes
concerning the deeper dharmic meanings of aspects of the human condition. Relatively
rarely, although increasingly more common, a monk has put his religious exegesis of ritual
into writing, thereby making it available for others to read or to use as a sermon. Whatever
the form might be, it has been the responsibility of monks from the earliest days of Buddhism
to provide others with religious - that is, dharmic - meanings for the elements of the
rituals which punctuate the process of human life.
This responsibility has led many monks to attend to the form as. well as to the content
of rituals. Indeed, in any Buddhist community it is always the monk (or ex-monk) who has
spent- many years in the Order who is the most knowledgeable regarding the traditional as
well as the essential (as prescribed by scriptural authority) elements of ritual. Again, this
knowledge has been communicated to others mainly by word of mouth; however, a few monks
have composed written guides to the procedure of the rituals performed within their
communities.
The text which I have translated here combines both an account of ritual procedure -
in this case, of the forms of rituals connected with death as they are carried out in the community
of Mae Sariang in northern Thailand - with a dharmic interpretation of this procedure.
This text is unusual in that it was not composed for the benefit of practising Buddhists in
Mae Sariang, but for the purpose of providing a foreign ethnographer - myself- with some
depth of understanding of death rituals which I had observed while engaged in research in
Mae Sariang.
I spent nearly 18 months in Mae Sariang during 1967-1968, engaged in a study of the
religious life of northern Thai Buddhists living in Mae Sariang town as well as other aspects
of culture and society in Mae Sariang District. 1 I was extraordinarily fortunate in my work
on Buddhist practice to gain not only the approval of Phra Khrii AnusaraQasasanakiarti,
the district ecclesiastical head of Mae Sariang District, but also his active involvement in
my undertaking. To this day he maintains an abiding interest in the culture of his native place,
and pursues this interest with intellectual inquisitiveness. On many occasions, I discovered
that my naive queries as to the nature of some practice served to stimulate him to provide
me with a detailed and systematic account. Towards the end of my stay in Mae Sariang, he
prepared, at my behest, a set of detailed notes on many of the ritual practices which I had
observed. The record of customs associated with death which is presented here was originally
written on 2 November 1968.
In the intervening decade, I have not had the time to return to this text, being concerned
with other work growing out of my research in Mae Sariang, as well as other research in
northeastern Thailand and in Chiang Mai. Only within the past year have I begun to focus
once more on the rituals which I observed in Mae Sariang. 2 Specifically, I have devoted my
attention primarily to those rituals connected with ordination into the Buddhist monkhood
1. My research was carried out with support from the National Science Foundation and the University
of Washington.
2. I am grateful for support, which has made my new work possible, granted by the Graduate School
Research Fund of the University of Washington and the Social Science Research Council. I am also
indebted to the University of Washington for giving me time during. a sabbatical leave to carry out this work.